Here's what we've been up to.

Nesting, Take 1: The Bathroom

Just over five months into the pregnancy, and we are well into redecorating mode. This is mostly really, really fun, except when my hormones gang up on me and I start crying about the color of the rug. As you can imagine, Oren really appreciates this sort of helpful design brainstorming. But eventually, we just blame all the strife on little unborn baby boy, and I blow my nose and eat some spaghetti and we get on with it. First up, the bathroom floor.

Whoever invented this vinyl/linoleum whatever the heck it is never-looks-clean flooring needs to be sentenced to a lifetime in the Ikea showroom. Our solution? Cover it up with some equally vinyl but much less ugly peel-and-stick wood planks, which hopefully will match the rest of the house. Thirty square feet of these, plus some discount codes, and we have a new bathroom floor for $45. Ha cha cha!

Now, I thought this would be a super easy project: Clean the floor, lay the planks, done. Right? Not so much. First, there was the matter of cutting the planks to fit around the toilet. Ever tried to make a toilet-base stencil? It’s not easy and not fun and not un-smelly. And we’re visual people! We ended up doing some fancy duct tape patchworking, which mostly worked and took two hours. (Lifting the toilet was the other option, but the thought of messing up and ending up with an ugly floor and a non-working toilet/plumbing problem was not appealing.)

Next we had to actually cut the vinyl planks, which was much harder than expected because a.) the bathroom walls are nowhere near square and b.) the vinyl just doesn’t cut well. Oren went at it with every cutting implement in the house while I sang him a song about eating sandwiches and not cutting off his fingers. I’m so helpful! So we finally get all the planks stuck down around the toilet and we’re making our way through the rest of the room when I notice, hey, there’s no way the door is going to close over these things. Oy.

We took a break for about a week (floor halfway finished) until we were ready to face it all again. In the one seamless component of this whole project, Oren was able to remove the door and shave it down to size in about 5 minutes. Voila. Then, all that was left to do was lay the last few boards and caulk around the edges. (The caulk jokes pretty much made up for everything else.) So without further ado—drumroll please—our new bathroom floor: